The Kids of Foxconn

Photographer Jordan Pouille has spent time at the massive Foxconn campus outside Shenzhen, the site of 13 worker suicides this year and the primary supplier for Apple and other global high-tech companies. He gets to know the workers, mostly young migrants from poor regions on the country, and describes their day-to-day lives, in words and pictures. From Jordan’s blog:

At the production line, none of them could speak or even look at each other while trying to achieve the christmas production targets. They had to leave their mobile at the entry. However, their managers tried not to insult them, after all the bad publicity they got last spring when the 13 Foxconn suicides hit the headlines. A big improvement has been made after 30 glorious years of economic reforms: more workers are now allowed to sit down (depending on the good will of their managers) while working.

These workers are teenagers or in their early twenties. They moved from remote areas in China: we call them Mingong or migrant workers. It’s usually they first job and they could not dream of a more dehumanized environnement.

Jordan wrote a longer piece in the French magazine La Vie. A teaser video is below: